Juried Student Exhibition

This fall, join us for an all-school juried art exhibition, with guest juror Sara Nickleson. The exhibition is sponsored by the CCS Valade Speaker Series.

Sara Nickleson is an artist, curator, and gallery director based in Detroit, Michigan. She has held the position of Senior Director at Library Street Collective gallery in Detroit since 2016. Prior to moving to Detroit, Nickleson was the Head Curator and Director of Collections at the Design Exchange (DX) in Toronto, Canada, where she curated several internationally acclaimed exhibitions, including This is Not a Toy (with John Wee Tom and Pharrell Williams), The Politics of Fashion, and 3DXL. Nickleson has written for arts publications, including exhibition catalogs (Jose Parla, Polarities; This is Not a Toy; Coping Mechanisms) and artist monographs (Sam Friedman). She has been a visiting curator and critic and was invited by the British Council to take part in their Design Connections symposium as part of London Design Week in 2015. Nickleson received her BFA from the University of Windsor (Windsor, Canada) and her BID from the College for Creative Studies (Detroit, MI); she graduated with her MFA in Painting from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, in 2024. In 2023, she had her first solo exhibition, The Fourth Way, at Louis Buhl & Co. (Detroit), and has taken pat in group exhibitions at Cranbrook Museum of Art (Bloomfield Hills), Reyes|Finn (Detroit), and as part of NADA CURATED (New Art Dealers Alliance): ASSEMBLY, curated by Katie A. Pfohl (Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, The Detroit Institute of Arts). Inspired by the enigmatic figuration of prehistoric relics, Nickleson imagines the body as impermanent, morphing and changing as a representation of a human condition that is awkward, expansive, and unknowable.

Nickleson lives and works in Detroit, MI.

More information will be released about this upcoming exhibition in September, 2024.